• 1963 – The United States Supreme Court rules 8–1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools.

Abington School District v. Schempp

Argued: February 27–28, 1963
Decided: June 17, 1963
Holding: Legally sanctioned or officially mandated Bible reading and prayer in public schools is unconstitutional.

Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court decided 8–1 in favor of the respondent, Edward Schempp, on behalf of his son Ellery Schempp, and declared that school-sponsored Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools in the United States was unconstitutional.

Background

Public schools in Pennsylvania had been required to start the school day by reading Bible verses since 1949. By the 1960s, four more states had passed similar laws requiring daily Bible reading. Twenty-five states had laws allowing "optional" Bible reading, with the remainder of the states having no laws supporting or rejecting Bible reading. In eleven of those states with laws supportive of Bible reading or state-sponsored prayer, state courts had declared the laws to be unconstitutional.

The Establishment Clause had already been applied to the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) by a process called incorporation

Edward Schempp, a Unitarian Universalist filed suit against the Abington School District in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging the Pennsylvania law under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Lower court history

During the first trial in federal district court, Edward Schempp and his children testified as to specific religious doctrines "which were contrary to the religious beliefs which they held and to their familial teaching".[10][11][12] The children testified that all of the doctrines to which they referred were read to them at various times as part of the exercises.[13] The other two children and Edward L. Schempp, their father, testified similarly. In November 1956 Ellory Schempp decided that he would read the Quran during the daily Bible reading and informed school personnel that he would no longer stand for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer because he felt it was unconstitutional.[14][12]

The district court ruled in Schempp's favor and struck down the Pennsylvania statute. The school district appealed the ruling. While that appeal was pending, the Pennsylvania legislature amended the statute to allow children to be excused from the exercises upon the written request of their parents. After the law changed, the Supreme Court vacated the first ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Schempp believed that, even with the change to allow students to leave the classroom, his children's relationships with their teachers and classmates would be adversely affected. The district court again found for Schempp. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court again, and, on appeal, the case was consolidated with a similar Maryland case Murray v. Curlett.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to settle the persistent and vigorous protests resulting from its previous decision in Engel v. Vitale regarding religion in schools. Henry W. Sawyer argued the case for Schempp.

Supreme Court of the United States

Majority opinion

The Supreme Court upheld the District Court's decision and found the Pennsylvania prayer statute unconstitutional. In writing the opinion of the Court, Justice Tom C. Clark stated, "This Court has decisively settled that the First Amendment's mandate [in the Establishment Clause] has been made wholly applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment ... in a series of cases since Cantwell. The Court explicitly upheld Engel v. Vitale in which the Court ruled that the sanctioning of a prayer by the school amounted to a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The Abington court held that in organizing a reading of the Bible, the school was conducting "a religious exercise," and "that cannot be done without violating the 'neutrality' required of the State by the balance of power between individual, church, and state that has been struck by the First Amendment" (374 U.S. 203 (1963)).

What was unexpected, however, were the ideas expressed in the second portion of Justice Clark's opinion written for the majority. The Court's recognition of religious ideals as valuable to the culture of the United States in that opinion are generally not cited much by either side of the church-state debate when discussing the case and the effect it had on the United States. His opening thoughts explicitly spelled out that view in past jurisprudence with cases similar to Abington v. Schempp.

Clark continued that the Court was of the feeling that regardless of the religious nature of the citizenry, the government at all levels, as required by the Constitution, must remain neutral in matters of religion "while protecting all, prefer[ring] none, and disparag[ing] none." The Court had rejected "the contention by many that the Establishment Clause forbade only governmental preference of one faith over another."

Citing Justice Hugo Black in Torcaso v. Watkins, Justice Clark added, "We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' Neither can it constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can it aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs." Such prohibited behavior was self-evident in the Pennsylvania law requiring Bible reading (and allowing recitation of the Lord's Prayer) in its public schools. The Court recognized the value of such ideal neutrality from lessons of history when government and religion were either fully fused or cooperative with one another and religious liberty was nonexistent or seriously curtailed.

{snip}